The Conversation Weekly

Inside the booming ‘shadow fleet’ industry keeping rogue states afloat

It’s the middle of the night in April 2023 in the East China Sea. A North Korean-linked oil tanker sailing under another country’s flag suddenly goes dark. It stops tran

The music that made Dolly Parton a global icon

It was 1967, and country musician Porter Wagoner was introducing a guest on his weekly TV show. The camera cuts to a woman with big, blonde beehive, wearing a magenta mi

How Ukraine is bringing the war home to Russia

In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have targeted large warehouses across Russia, destroying millions of dollars of merchandise stored inside them. These warehouses and lo

How Timor-Leste is fighting back against Asia’s scamming gangs

🔁 Rerun: originally published 12/12/25. We're revisiting this episode as we take a quick break but we'll be back next week with a new instalment of The Conversation Weekl

Loonies and bins: Britain's long love affair with novelty politics

It's pretty grim when your main political opponent is a man with a bin for a head. That's the situation that's faced Nigel Farage in the Clacton byelection in the UK. C

The soviet origins of shadow libraries

Balázs Bödö's first interaction with a shadow library was when, as a young professor at university in Budapest, he was faced with a dilemma: what should he teach his stud

A window into the murky world of peptides

Timothy Piatkowki was scrolling when a targeted ad landed in his feed. Cheap peptides! Straight from the factory! Naturally, he started a chat with the dealer and found h

Save our brains: how dangerous is sport?

With growing evidence about concussion, repetitive head impacts and long-term brain disease, have we underestimated the risks of sport all along? How did we get here, wha

How Manchester shaped Andy Burnham, the UK's incoming prime minister

Three months ago, Andy Burnham’s desk was filled with the business of running Greater Manchester. Buses. Housing. Policing. This mayoral region in the north of England is

How celebrities like Taylor Swift are fighting back against AI deepfakes

When Taylor Swift launched her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, in October 2025, she recorded two short clips to promote it. One for Amazon Music began with “Hey, it

The anatomy of a super El Niño

El Niño has begun and forecasters predict a more than 60% chance that the naturally occurring phenomenon could become a very strong, or super El Niño later in 2026. El N

Cockroach party hits nerve with angry young Indians

A new youth protest movement in India that started as online satire is now staging an ongoing sit-in in New Delhi calling for the resignation of India’s education ministe

Teens are still on social media, but does that mean Australia's ban has failed?

When Australia banned under 16-year-olds from using social media in December 2025, it became a test case for a policy now being pursued by governments around the world. T

How the US finally fell in love with soccer

When Roberto Baggio missed a penalty in the 1994 Fifa World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, more than 94,000 people were there to watch Italian heartb

Two scientists on their race to make a new Ebola vaccine

As health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continue to battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak, scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine agai

The salt caverns used to stockpile oil

Buried underground in caverns dug out of salt on the Gulf coast of the US are millions of barrels worth of crude oil. This is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, built up in

Argentina’s inflation ‘miracle’ is more of a mirage

The month Javier Milei took over as president of Argentina in December 2023, monthly inflation was 25.5%. The annual rate for that year was 211%. Now, it’s plummeted to 3

The conspiracy theorists who feel vindicated by the Epstein files

As the revelations from the Epstein files continue to reverberate around the globe, those conspiracy theorists who were among the first to call for the release of informa

China’s long game on Trump’s tariffs

As Xi Jinping prepares to host Donald Trump for a delayed summit in Beijing on May 14-15, a lot has changed since the US president's last visit to China in November 2017.

Trump v Leo: the war of words over a just war

After Donald Trump took to social media to lambast Pope Leo's criticism of the Iran war, the pontiff told journalists "I'm not afraid of the Trump administration". Part o